Court Outcomes Research Articles

The War on Drugs in Juvenile Court? The Influence of Community Context on Juvenile Court Outcomes for White, Black, and Hispanic Youth

Prior research on race/ethnicity and juvenile court processing have found that youth of color often receive disadvantaged outcomes compared to their White counterparts, and that community context may condition this relationship. The current study examined this association between race/ethnicity (White, Black, Hispanic) and type of drug offense (possession vs. distribution) with adjudication and disposition outcomes, especially the tempering effect of disadvantaged community characteristics. Results from multi-level models indicated that Black youth who were charged with a drug distribution offense were more likely to receive residential placement compared to similarly situated Whites. Underclass poverty and racial/ethnic inequality moderated these associations, but the significance and direction of the results differed depending on the stage examined. The findings reveal ongoing racial/ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system, and offer clearer insights into the conditions under which youth of color charged with different drug offenses are processed in juvenile court.

Is there a mental health wake following the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescents in a male juvenile prison?

Lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic loom large in the United States but are particularly of concern in prison settings. In the current study, we examine the ongoing mental health consequences of the pandemic among young people incarcerated in a male juvenile prison. Sequential mixed methods data were obtained-78 young people assigned male at birth completed surveys and 19 completed individual interviews. Seven staff were also interviewed about youth experiences during and following the pandemic. Youth survey results indicated racial and ethnic identity exploration, feeling less safe at night, and experiencing staff harassment were significantly associated with some negative mental health concerns, yet lingering COVID-19 policies were not. Triangulation with interviews underscored these findings by highlighting more specific concerns related to COVID-19, such as social isolation, loneliness, and concerns about the indirect effects the pandemic might have on court outcomes and educational goals. Overall, results of the current analysis provide evidence that incarceration continues to be traumatizing and harmful to youth mental health even following the pandemic. To a lesser extent, these results also imply that lingering effects of the pandemic and concurrent cultural and racial tensions have delayed impacts on the mental health of incarcerated youth during this tumultuous time. Taken together, study findings suggests juvenile prisons must implement readiness plans to mitigate these and other harmful effects of juvenile incarceration in the future.

A multi-state evaluation of extreme risk protection orders: a research protocol

BackgroundExtreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs) are civil court orders that prohibit firearm purchase and possession when someone is behaving dangerously and is at risk of harming themselves and/or others. As of June 2024, ERPOs are available in 21 states and the District of Columbia to prevent firearm violence. This paper describes the design and protocol of a six-state study of ERPO use.MethodsThe six states included are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, and Washington. During the 3-year project period (2020–2023), ERPO case files were obtained through public records requests or through agreements with agencies with access to these data in each state. A team of over four dozen research assistants from seven institutions coded 6628 ERPO cases, abstracting 80 variables per case under domains related to respondent characteristics, events and behaviors leading to ERPO petitions, petitioner types, and court outcomes. Research assistants received didactic training through an online learning management system that included virtual training modules, quizzes, practice coding exercises, and two virtual synchronous sessions. A protocol for gaining strong interrater reliability was used. Research assistants also learned strategies for reducing the risk of experiencing secondary trauma through the coding process, identifying its occurrence, and obtaining help.DiscussionAddressing firearm violence in the U.S. is a priority. Understanding ERPO use in these six states can inform implementation planning and ERPO uptake, including promising opportunities to enhance safety and prevent firearm-related injuries and deaths. By publishing this protocol, we offer detailed insight into the methods underlying the papers published from these data, and the process of managing data abstraction from ERPO case files across the multi-state and multi-institution teams involved. Such information may also inform future analyses of this data, and future replication efforts.RegistrationThis protocol is registered on Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/kv4fc/).

Criminal Court Outcomes and Public Expectations: Is Alignment Necessary and How Can it be Achieved?

Criminal Court Outcomes and Public Expectations: Is Alignment Necessary and How Can it be Achieved?

Forensic intelligence in Australia and New Zealand: Status and future directions

Forensic science is underutilised. Operating models restricted to the support of court outcomes do not address core requirements of contemporary policing and public security, which are to disrupt criminal activity and prevent crime. Forensic intelligence (FORINT) is a principal means of enhancing the role of forensic science, emphasising proactivity and cross-case, cross-crime domain insights. To catalyse implementation, a FORINT Specialist Advisory Group (SAG) has been established under the Australia & New Zealand Policing Advisory Agency (ANZPAA) National Institute of Forensic Science (NIFS). The SAG has established a concept of operations with four lines of effort – namely, to (i) promote awareness and consistency, (ii) shape the workforce, (iii) develop information management frameworks and (iv) guide operational implementation. This aims to shift Australia & New Zealand from its present state (of substantial interagency variability) to a state of widespread, consistent and effective FORINT delivery in terms of: (a) culture, (b) information management, (c) education & training, and (d) organisation & operating environment. There are risks to implementing FORINT, in terms of privacy/confidentiality, bias/misinterpretation, and resource impost. However, these are not necessarily FORINT-specific, and solutions or mitigations exist. Moreover, these issues are outweighed by the risks of not implementing FORINT – such as a failure to reveal threats, missed opportunities, and poor resource efficiency. This paper is a call to arms. For policing and laboratories – now is the time to implement and entrench FORINT. For academia – now is the time to build foundations for this future. For supporting industries – now is the time to develop partnerships and facilitate delivery.

Men after the sexual assault: The journey from medical service to court

BackgroundThere may be significant physical and psychological consequences and impacts for males who experience sexual assault as adults, however, published literature in this context is sparse, specifically for the investigative outcomes in the criminal legal process. MethodThis clinical audit tracked 138 adult males who presented for forensic and medical sexual assault care from initial presentation to ACT Police investigation and court outcome from 2004 to 2022. ResultsThere were 103/138 (74.6%) males who attended for medical and forensic care within 72 h of the reported assault. Pre-existing mental health conditions were self-reported in 59/138 (42.7%) males.Nearly half of males 67/138 (48.5%) had a medical evidence kit collected. Males presenting for medical care 44/138 (31.2%) went on to report to ACT Policing, 36/44 (81.2%) of cases did not proceed to court. The most common clearance type was inadequate evidence to proceed (17/44, 38.6%).In 8/44 (18.2%) of adult male cases who subsequently reported to ACT Police, the investigation resulted in entry to the judicial process with a suspect charged with a sexual offence. Five of those cases resulting in a conviction. ConclusionsMany adult male patients presented within timeframes that enabled the provision of time critical medical care and provided an opportunity for forensic medical evidence collection. Many adult males 59 (42.7%) self-reported pre-existing mental health conditions upon initial presentation.Attrition occurred throughout the patient journey with many males not reporting to police and thus not presenting in the legal process. This further emphasises the need for independent sexual violence patient advisors to support adult male victims through the medical and criminal justice process.

A Neural Network model for Indian Supreme Court legal judgment prediction

Industry experts are motivated to collect, collate, and analyse historical data in the legal sector in attempt to predict court case outcomes as the amount of historical data available in this field has increased over time. But using judicial data to predict and defend court judgements is no simple undertaking. Using Machine Learning (ML) models and traditional approaches for categorical feature encoding, previous research on predicting court outcomes using limited experimental datasets produced a number of unexpected predictions. The paper proposes an ensemble model combining Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), attention mechanism and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGB) algorithm. This model is primarily based on a self-attention network, which could simultaneously capture linguistic relationships over lengthy sequences like RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) and is nevertheless speedy to train like CNN. C-XGB can obtain accuracy that surpasses the state-of-art model on numerous classification/prediction tasks simultaneously as being twice as speedy to train. The proposed C-XGB model is designed to process the documents hierarchically and calculates the attention weights. Two convolutional layers are used to calculate the attention weights, one at the word level and another at the sentence level. And finally, at the last layer, the XGB algorithm predicts the input case file’s outcome. The experimental results shows that the proposed model outperforms the existing model with 4.67% improvement in accuracy value.

U.S. District Court Judicial Diversity: The Impact of Race and Sex Composition on Sentencing Outcomes at the District Level

The demographic diversity of the federal bench has emerged as a salient issue for the American public. Although research has examined the impact of judges’ race and sex on various court outcomes, including sentencing, for several decades across different levels of courts, findings remain mixed. Race and sex diversity of the U.S. District Courts has increased in recent years, coinciding with the transition from mandatory to advisory sentencing guidelines. The current study examines the impact of changes in the race and sex composition of federal trial courts on district-level sentencing outcomes for different demographic groups of offenders. The findings provide evidence that the race and sex composition of the District Courts impacts sentencing outcomes in both expected and unexpected ways.

Ethnic Inequalities in Sentencing: Evidence from the Crown Court in England and Wales

Abstract In recent years, there has been considerable policy and academic interest in the existence of ethnic inequalities in the Criminal Justice System. A large body of sentencing research has been dedicated to exploring whether ethnic minority defendants are treated more harshly than similarly situated white defendants. This paper extends this research utilizing Ministry of Justice linked criminal justice datasets and multilevel models to assess the effect of ethnicity and other defendant case and contextual factors on sentencing outcomes in the Crown Court. The analysis shows that legal characteristics such as plea, pre-trial detention, offence type and severity are important factors determining sentencing outcomes although they do not fully explain disparities in these outcomes between ethnic groups. Ethnic disparities in imprisonment persist and, in some cases, become more pronounced after controlling for defendant case and court factors. In contrast, ethnic disparities in sentence length are largely explained by legal factors, and after adjusting for other predictors of sentencing outcomes, observed differences between most (but not all) ethnic minority groups and the white British disappear.

Prediction of Arabic Legal Rulings Using Large Language Models

In the intricate field of legal studies, the analysis of court decisions is a cornerstone for the effective functioning of the judicial system. The ability to predict court outcomes helps judges during the decision-making process and equips lawyers with invaluable insights, enhancing their strategic approaches to cases. Despite its significance, the domain of Arabic court analysis remains under-explored. This paper pioneers a comprehensive predictive analysis of Arabic court decisions on a dataset of 10,813 commercial court real cases, leveraging the advanced capabilities of the current state-of-the-art large language models. Through a systematic exploration, we evaluate three prevalent foundational models (LLaMA-7b, JAIS-13b, and GPT-3.5-turbo) and three training paradigms: zero-shot, one-shot, and tailored fine-tuning. In addition, we assess the benefit of summarizing and/or translating the original Arabic input texts. This leads to a spectrum of 14 model variants, for which we offer a granular performance assessment with a series of different metrics (human assessment, GPT evaluation, ROUGE, and BLEU scores). We show that all variants of LLaMA models yield limited performance, whereas GPT-3.5-based models outperform all other models by a wide margin, surpassing the average score of the dedicated Arabic-centric JAIS model by 50%. Furthermore, we show that all scores except human evaluation are inconsistent and unreliable for assessing the performance of large language models on court decision predictions. This study paves the way for future research, bridging the gap between computational linguistics and Arabic legal analytics.

The Effects of Decision Fatigue on Judicial Behavior: A Study of Arkansas Traffic Court Outcomes

Abstract Judges who hear multiple cases a day may become exhausted by the time later cases are heard, increasing susceptibility to cognitive depletion, yet the role of workload fatigue in decision-making from hearing cases has rarely been tested in the U.S. One problem is the lack of public data—most U.S. courts do not maintain time-stamped records of case hearings. Using an original dataset of all traffic cases heard in Pulaski County, Arkansas in 2019 and 2020, we examine whether decision fatigue affects case outcomes. We find that charges are less likely to be dismissed in arraignment hearings at the end of a court session than in those at the beginning. This pattern, however, does not hold for trial hearings, suggesting that the effects of fatigue may be context-specific. We suggest policy recommendations to mitigate the effects of decision fatigue in lower courts—courts having the most contact with citizens.

IQ thresholds and influence of the assessor’s professional discipline on fitness to stand trial assessment outcomes in Aotearoa New Zealand

There is considerable variability in fitness to stand trial (FST) findings between assessors, which may potentially influence the courts’ decisions for defendants with intellectual disability (ID). This study aims to determine the influence of the defendant’s intelligence quotient (IQ) score and the assessor’s professional discipline on FST findings and court outcomes for ID defendants in Aotearoa New Zealand. This study included 146 defendants with ID who were assessed between 2005 and 2015. Study findings revealed that psychologists find defendants unfit to stand trial at a higher IQ score than psychiatrists. Notwithstanding, there was a general agreement between the professions regarding the defendant’s fitness to stand trial. Furthermore, the assessor’s discipline did not appear to unduly influence the court’s decision on fitness to stand trial. NZ court cases are discussed to highlight the issues with mild to moderate ID defendants previously found fit to stand trial.

Bankruptcy Resolution: Misery or Strategy

Contrary to conventional wisdom, this study reports a positive relationship between large US firms' leverage levels and their likelihood of emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In anticipation of a favourable court outcome, which allows them to emerge from bankruptcy with reduced debt, firms tend to increase their leverage levels in the years preceding the bankruptcy filing year. This suggests strategic abuse of bankruptcy courts and creditors. Test results suggest that firms start acting strategically up to four years before filing for bankruptcy so that they can emerge with a reduced debt burden at the cost of creditors. Additionally, our study also contributes to the corporate bankruptcy literature by exploring a set of factors (related to the firm, judicial, case, geographic, and macroeconomic characteristics) explaining the likelihood of firms emerging from bankruptcy, and proposing a parsimonious multivariate model that best predicts the likelihood of surviving Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Cash Bail and Trial Outcomes in an Early Twentieth-Century Southern Police Court

Cash Bail and Trial Outcomes in an Early Twentieth-Century Southern Police Court

Coparenting and intimate partner violence

AbstractIntimate partner violence (IPV) is a major public health issue across the globe due to its associations with health and wellbeing, especially among mothers and children. These associations are often more pronounced following separation or divorce, which can compromise safety given that women and children are at heightened risk during these transitions. Thus, it is critical to understand the implications of coparenting in the context of IPV. In this paper, we first discuss the literature on IPV broadly. In particular, we discuss the differences between two types of violence: coercive controlling violence (i.e., violence that occurs in the context of systematic control) and situational couple violence (i.e., violence that occurs without a pattern of control). We then link it to parenting and coparenting processes as they relate to separation and divorce. In this section, we focus heavily on the ways in which the legal system affects family dynamics as divorces make their way through the courts. Special attention is paid to the ways in which IPV affects child custody decisions and the safety of those decisions given empirical evidence suggesting that raising allegations of IPV often does not help achieve favorable court outcomes. We conclude with recommendations to guide family court practitioners based upon this substantial literature. Such recommendations center on the development and implementation of empirically‐derived assessment tools as well as systematic training of legal professionals.

Child protection proceedings for infants: Analysis of court files to identify court outcomes and requirements for families in child protection safety plans

Given the increasing involvement of families in child protection processes pre-birth and during infancy, it is imperative that we have greater evidence of child protection processes during this period. A court file review was used to determine the characteristics and issues for families who are going through care proceedings for their infants, the outcomes of court proceedings and the safety plans required for families. Of the 39 court files analysed 36 % of the families were reported to child protection prenatally and 64 % were reported postnatally. One in five infants were removed into care directly from the maternity ward with the average age of removal being 4.9 months. The main child protection concerns related to domestic violence (51 %), drug and alcohol use (49 %) and mental health issues (41 %). The majority of these cases resulted in final orders with a large proportion having until 18 protection orders (41 %), and 23 % having orders revoked or withdrawn allowing the infant to be reunified to the family. The complexity of issues of the cases in these care proceedings highlights the need for greater sophistication in strategies to support these families who cross multiple service systems to enable reunification of families and prevention of removals.

Assessing Individual Level Predictors of Intermediate Outcomes in a Misdemeanor Diversion Drug Court

Assessing Individual Level Predictors of Intermediate Outcomes in a Misdemeanor Diversion Drug Court

Espionage by Europeans: treason and counterintelligence in post-Cold War Europe

ABSTRACT As War rages in Ukraine, counterintelligence has again taken centre stage for European intelligence agencies. In spite of the long-ascendant espionage threat, to date little is known about who is recruited, what motivated them and how they were caught. This article presents an analysis of espionage against European NATO and/or EU members, based on court convictions in 2010–2021. This provides a first overview of contemporary espionage in Europe, and complements previous research, which is dominated by single-case studies, mainly of Anglo-Saxon cases. Replicating large-N studies of American espionage, the study identifies transatlantic commonalities, including perpetrators being overwhelmingly male, middle-aged, and a mainly working outside of defence or intelligence agencies. But also differences, with Russia being by far the main instigator of espionage in Europe, a strong concentration of cases in Northern Europe, and a diversity of legislation coinciding with equally variable outcomes in court. Generally, the similarities speak to the nature of contemporary espionage, whereas the differences are chiefly attributable to geopolitical differences between the US and Europe.

Can Pre‐recorded Evidence Raise Conviction Rates in Cases of Domestic Violence?

AbstractThis paper explores the association between pre‐recorded evidence and court outcomes in cases of domestic violence. Net of controls and time fixed effects, we find that cases with pre‐recorded evidence are 3.4 percentage points more likely to result in a conviction. This increase occurs through three channels: a 5.6 percentage point increase in the probability of a conviction among (the one in four) cases that proceed to a defended hearing; a 2.4 percentage point increase in the probability of a guilty plea; and, a 2.4 percentage point decrease in the probability that the prosecution withdraws their case.

Legal bordering of asylum through liminality

Unlike the permanent and legitimizing protections of asylum more widely available to other nationalities, current US immigration law and legal mechanisms maintain large numbers of Central American asylum seekers in a perpetual state of legal limbo and precarity. Those able to argue their case in immigration court are most often denied asylum but increasing numbers are allowed to stay in the US in a legally liminal status. The resulting legal limbo for these would-be asylees subjects them to a permanent state of legal violence in the US’ racialized immigration climate. Analysis of US immigration court outcomes from 1997 to 2022 traces the historical denial of asylum to Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Honduran nationals. A recent administrative tactic to address the historic immigration court backlog of asylum cases, dismissal of cases, are the latest in a historic pattern of granting Central American asylum-seekers temporary status with no pathway to permanent legal status. We argue that the rapid rise in immigration court dismissals is the latest means of denying asylum and casting Central American asylum seekers into a prolonged state of legal ambiguity in the US. While allowing refugee-migrants who are fleeing violence to remain in the US, these same individuals are excluded from legal protections and are exposed to the racialized violence of living as a criminalized underclass in US society.